As you’re making the pancakes (each one will take 5 or so minutes per side), stir together dry ingredients in a small saucepan. Add vanilla & water, then bring to a boil. Stir often and keep on heat until it thickens – about 7 minutes.

I may have gone a little overboard at the farmer’s market last weekend. I came home with a large bag of apples, eggplant, squash, and several pounds sweet potatoes.

In my defense, though, it’s the first appearance of fall foods! Maybe not THE most wonderful time of the year, but certainly up there.

With all this food, I needed some good fall recipes. I found them in spades (thank you, allrecipes & pinterest!).

I decided to go for the sweet potatoes first: and I settled upon sweet potato pie.

Healthy (…kind of), delicious, and oh-so-fall. It has a similar texture to pumpkin pie, but with that great sweet potato flavor. I cheated and used store bought piecrust, which made the recipe incredibly easy to make – the hardest part was cooking the sweet potatoes.

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prick sweet potatoes & bake for 45-50 minutes, or until tender (alternatively, you can boil them for 45 minutes, but I think baking them preserves the taste better. Remove from oven and rinse with cold water to remove skin. Mash in large bowl. Lower oven temperature to 350 degrees.

3. Bake for 55-60 minutes (don’t forget to lower it to 350 degrees), until knife inserted comes out cleanly. Cool on counter for half hour, then in fridge for 3 hours.

Don’t neglect that last step – I cooled it for a half hour and cheated, and I was disappointed until I had a piece later (…for breakfast. It was a perfect breakfast). The flavor & texture improves a ton once it’s chilled completely.

Once you’ve restrained yourself until it cooled all the way…add some whipped cream on top and dig in!

I was sitting around one night after dinner, not particularly hungry but desperately craving something sweet. I took to Pinterest to distract myself and found this little gem: spiced apple mug cake. Apples, cake, near instant gratification… what more could I want? Since it’s a microwave mug cake, there aren’t actual apples in, but the spices mean one important thing:

It’s officially fall, y’all.

I made some modifications to make it healthier, and it ended up more of an apple bread rather than cake. No less delicious, though. And since any apple dessert calls for vanilla ice cream, I substituted what I had on hand: plain greek yogurt and honey. It ended up being healthy, delicious, quick dessert. Exactly what I wanted!

And that’s it! You’ve got apple spice mug cake. That easy. I dug the cake out of the mug, plopped some of my greek yogurt on it, and drizzled honey on it. The original recipe calls for salted caramel sauce, but I all I had was the honey. To me, the honey added just the right note of sweetness. To keep the apple pie taste, I sprinkled (poured) more cinnamon over top.